Between music and medicine

(Link: https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_gupta_between_music_and_medicine?referrer=playlist-how_music_affects_us)

- How does music affect you?

- Can you think of a time when music changed your mood?

- Do you think that listening to music can lead to solving health issues?

Here are some of Robert Gupta’s experiences with the subject

2.46

A few weeks ago, I saw a video on YouTube of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at the
early stages of her recovery from one of those awful bullets. This one entered her left
hemisphere, and knocked out her Broca's area, the speech center of her brain. And in this
session, Gabby's working with a speech therapist, and she's struggling to produce some of the
most basic words, and you can see her growing more and more devastated, until she ultimately
breaks down into sobbing tears, and she starts sobbing wordlessly into the arms of her
therapist. And after a few moments, her therapist tries a new tack, and they start singing
together and Gabby starts to sing through her tears, and you can hear her clearly able to
enunciate the words to a song that describe the way she feels, and she sings, in one descending
scale, she sings, "Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine." And it's a very powerful and poignant
reminder of how the beauty of music has the ability to speak where words fail, in this case
literally speak.

7.31

But a year later, I met another musician who had also studied at Juilliard, one who
profoundly helped me find my voice and shaped my identity as a musician. Nathaniel Ayers
was a double bassist at Juilliard, but he suffered a series of psychotic episodes in his early
20s, was treated with thorazine at Bellevue, and ended up living homeless on the streets of Skid
Row in downtown Los Angeles 30 years later. Nathaniel's story has become a beacon for
homelessness and mental health advocacy throughout the United States, as told through the
book and the movie "The Soloist," but I became his friend, and I became his violin teacher, and
I told him that wherever he had his violin, and wherever I had mine, I would play a lesson with
him.
 8.15

And on the many times I saw Nathaniel on Skid Row, I witnessed how music was able to
bring him back from his very darkest moments, from what seemed to me in my untrained eye to
be the beginnings of a schizophrenic episode. Playing for Nathaniel, the music took on a deeper
meaning, because now it was about communication, a communication where words failed, a
communication of a message that went deeper than words, that registered at a fundamentally
primal level in Nathaniel's psyche, yet came as a true musical offering from me. I found myself
growing outraged that someone like Nathaniel could have ever been homeless on Skid
Row because of his mental illness, yet how many tens of thousands of others there were out
there on Skid Row alone who had stories as tragic as his, but were never going to have a book or
a movie made about them that got them off the streets. And at the very core of this crisis of
mine, I felt somehow the life of music had chosen me, where somehow, perhaps possibly in a
very naive sense, I felt what Skid Row really needed was somebody like Paul Farmer and not
another classical musician playing on Bunker Hill.

10.26

After one of our events at the Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, a woman walked up
to us and she had tears streaming down her face, and she had a palsy, she was shaking, and she
had this gorgeous smile, and she saidthat she had never heard classical music before, she didn't
think she was going to like it, she had never heard a violin before, but that hearing this music
was like hearing the sunshine, and that nobody ever came to visit them, and that for the first
time in six years, when she heard us play, she stopped shaking without medication.
Vocabulary. Match the words with their meanings

 bullets  the most important or

essential part of anything

 devastated  a course of action, a tactic

 to sob  paralysis or trembling of

the muscles

 to break down into VERB  beautiful

tears

 tack  a small piece of metal fired

from a gun

 poignant  to burst into tears, to

suddenly start crying
inconsolably

 palsy ADJECTIVE  affecting the emotions

 gorgeous  to weep with a convulsive

catching of the breath
 beacon  to see, hear, or know by
personal presence and
experience

 advocacy  the mental or

psychological structure of
a person

 to witness NOUN  crushed, shocked, and

overwhelmed

 psyche  strongly offended

 outraged  a guiding signal, as a light

 core  the act of supporting

something publicly